Poverty is what’s crippling public education in the US—not bad teachers
By Anthony Cody 6 hours ago
Anthony Cody worked in the high poverty schools of Oakland, California, for 24 years, and spent 18 years teaching middle school science. He now leads workshops focused on Project Based Learning.
Earlier this month in New Zealand, the minister of education Hekia Parata shared a piece of knowledge that has become common the world over. In the Southland Times, “Experts have found that four consecutive years of quality teaching eliminated any trace of socio-economic disadvantage.”
The source of this is an American economist by the name of Eric Hanushek, a professor at Stanford University, who has been spreading this for the past several years. According to Hanushek, “Good teachers are ones who get large gains in student achievement for their classes; bad teachers are just the opposite.”
He looks at the distribution of student test scores, and imagines that if we could fire the teachers who are associated with the lowest 10% or so, then we would make huge gains. This is the theory behind a great deal of the push for 21st century K-12 education reform in the US. In order to identify and efficiently dispatch these slackers, we need national standards, and rigorous tests aligned to them.
This has led reformers to advocate that we:
- Test students more often, so we can measure learning incrementally. Test
